Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sai Srikar Hari. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Sai Srikar, appreciate you joining us today. Going back to the beginning – how did you come up with the idea in the first place?
Upon completing my undergraduate in 2015 until I started graduate school in 2022, I was absorbed in learning and gaining hands-on experience in various capacities in the Film Industry in Mumbai, India, later on working with NGOs in documentary and journalistic projects around the Southeast Asian region. This allowed me to explore the possibilities and limitations of story-telling within my work inducing a curiosity towards finding a direction and intervention through video, photo and other forms of visual media. While observation and documentation led me towards creating anecdotal work that was deeply inspired by and involved the communities I collaborated with, I soon realized the inherent power dynamics of the camera as a device and the biases of communicating through a visual medium. My practice started shifting towards creating work that can reveal new perspectives of reality in the viewers, instead of memorialising subjects and fixing the image using a singular perspective of the camera.
In graduate school it became important for me to critique and understand the inherent abstractions of the photographic device, ubiquity of the screens producing and disseminating these images as data that is manipulated in real-time. Turning my focus there allowed me to re-think the dynamics of the relationship between the device, its operator and the world. When I look through the camera out into the world, this is not necessarily because the world interests me; rather I am interested in pursuing newer possibilities for producing and evaluating the world through digital images. The curiosity to assemble and disassemble these devices to learn the inner mechanisms by experimenting with sensors to grasp their functional role, gave me an understanding of how devices translate the world around us.
Sai Srikar, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My current practice combines various image-making processes both digital & analogue to explore emotional, psychological and phenomenological effects of new media and image production in the 21st century. Through these works I aim to bring forward the unthinking reliance on the solidity of the digital image and the technologies producing it. These translate as visual experiments which are often installations, set up to blend with existing spaces, acting as an intervention in the viewers’ perceived reality and urge them to rethink their perception of the world mediated by the devices. I am moved by a genuine will to challenge the trappings of incessantly debated dissonance, between the mental self-image and the outward representation of ourselves within the technologically saturated image-based world. To make an image in this digital age is a process of not only photographing, but also of creating experiences that re-contextualise how intangible digital images affect the tangible physical world.
With today’s digital technology, the image is no longer a stable representation of the world, but a programmable database that is updated in real time. We increasingly live in a world where images are involved in a multitude of processes that are hidden behind their appearances on screen and their so-called “interactivity”. The experiences I create become an invitation for the viewer to explore the malleability of human perception and the devices’ ability to trigger and affect this plasticity.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
I am particularly interested in developing a practice based research that focuses on the historical formation of screen cultures and their emergence and evolution in transnational contexts. Through my explorations I want to build on these realms to designing new experiences by using technology; allowing for the experience of reality to oscillate between action-reaction to create moments that accentuate and challenge the threshold where the digital becomes analog, the imagined becomes tactile, to create abstractions of the self that hover between stillness and motion.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of involving myself in this creative process is the ability it gives to discover the malleability of human perception and the way in which technology extends our vision of the world around us. As much as it is a process of self discovery it also becomes a process to understand the world around us.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://harisaisrikar.wixsite.com/srikar
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/srikar_hari/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/srikar-hari-12808441/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@harisaisrikar1393
Image Credits
All images by Srikar Hari (author)